First Watercolor from my Vacation Odyssey

Abandoned Caboose near Southmayd, Texas

On Saturday, 15 August, I completed my first watercolor from my “Vacation Odyssey.”  I found this abandoned caboose on Texas Highway 82, west of Sherman, near Southmayd.   I pulled the Jeep over and took several digital photographs.  A few nights later, at my parents house in High Ridge, Missouri, I sketched the caboose and painted in the sky, then left the watercolor to “compost” for a couple of weeks.  At Saturday’s SonsStock Art & Music Festival at Sons of Hermann Hall, I created a small “working space” in the midst of my booth display, and completed this painting by early evening.

Trains have been my fantasy since my earliest, pre-literate years.  The bright colors always held my fascination when Mom & Dad took me to Union Station in St. Louis to pick up Grandma who had come for a visit from the country.  Over one hundred passenger trains per day pulled into that 31-track trainshed, and I still remember the brilliant crimson of the Frisco “F” diesels.

Now as I look upon this faded green & gold of the “Katy” railroad, I recall my boyhood wonder the first time I was allowed entrance into a caboose.  The beds, the kitchenette with coffeepot, the small office space, and oh my, that wonderful view out the windows above, over the top of the railroad train, and the vista of the surrounding fields.  The brakeman must have felt like the skipper on a ship at sea.  I always wished I could read a book, or even write a book, while riding cross country, living in a caboose.

Today, they are detached from the trains, and cast aside.   My company is Recollections 54.  In 1954, cabooses completed the trains.  Now they are only remembered as a part of our American past.

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